A few posts back, I posted the text of a medieval Latin hymn to the Goddess of Love from the 13th century “Little Renaissance.” At the time, I included a literal translation, but declined to translate it into poetry on the grounds that I couldn't do it justice.
What I had unwittingly done, of course, was to set myself a challenge.
(In the unlikely event that you've ever wondered what poets do while lying awake at night, you now know.)
So here's the best that I can do with it. You can even sing it to the same tune.
I thought I'd get the jump on Beltane and talk about everyone's favourite May Day song (even if you're not on Summer Isle) as it is a great piece of history. 'Sumer is icumen in' also known as the 'cuckoo song' embodies that glorious sense of happiness that the first real warm days offer us. Here in the north we still can't quite believe that summer is a-coming, which makes me want to sing it even more.
This is the earliest secular song recorded in English in the Middle Ages and appears in a 13th century manuscript along with a Latin version. Here's the original lyrics:
The walls of the medieval castle flicker in the light of the torches as crowds mill across the courtyard. The smell of cooking fires and stew waft from the kitchen and another group of people in medieval clothes, some in chain-mail, pass me on their way to the tavern. I watch them descend the well-trodden stone stairs, then turn toward the tower, hoping to get a break from the crowd and a better look at this medieval market from above.
Another confession: Instead of attacking De Occulta Philosophia, I'm going for the throat on Marsilio Ficino.
A few years ago, I came across a book called "Music in Renaissance Magic" by Gary Tomlinson. He focuses on the magic of a man named Marsilio Ficino, who was a priest and the doctor of Lorenzo de Medici. Ficino is somewhat contemporary to Agrippa in the way that they both translated documents from Greek into Latin, and then proceeded to create their own synthesis of learning from those experiences.
Ficino stood out to Tomlinson because he wrote magical music. None of that music exists; it has all been lost to time, as Ficino's De vita libri tres has been out of my reach through library (another long story) and is too expensive to purchase. Until now.
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